Daily Archives: November 1, 2010

There is growing outrage about the TSA’s new airport policy that requires all passengers to submit to body scans that reveal them naked on devices that can store images. Travelers wishing to avoid this, and the known carcinogenic effects of the ionizing radiation employed by these “porno-scanners,” can “opt out” and then must endure such aggressive genital groping by TSA agents that it constitutes sexual assault. Our government, through the Homeland Security’s TSA agents, is routinely engaging in behavior that would land any of us citizens in jail if we did the same.
What can we do to stop this from happening? Why are our freedoms continually being eroded? It is obvious that governmental forces and agencies are increasingly stealing our basic rights and liberties, and I urge all of us to take this seriously and to look deeply to understand the roots of this so we can ensure our freedoms won’t be further eroded. Representative Ron Paul recently introduced a bill in Congress to safeguard our freedoms. It is a simple bill that would require government agents to abide by the same laws that we must abide by. In his speech on the floor of the House, Paul compared the treatment of travelers to the treatment of cattle being rounded up for slaughter. This is absolutely apt, and it reveals why we continue to witness our freedoms being blatantly stolen, and why we seem so powerless to prevent it from happening.
One of the most important principles that we are called to understand by our inherent yearning for meaning and wisdom is that whatever we sow, we will eventually reap. As I emphasize in The World Peace Diet, our routine abuse of animals for food inevitably boomerangs; we end up experiencing what we inflict on them. It’s so obvious that it’s amazing more people don’t notice it and talk about it. Lately, we’ve been witnessing the emergence of more and more mandatory vaccinations, for example. The cows, pigs, and other animals confined for food do not have a choice as to which vaccinations and drugs will be forced on them. They are injected with dozens of different drugs, hormones, and antibiotics not for their benefit, but for the benefit of those who dominate and use them. Their sovereignty and purposes are completely stolen from them.
How do we think, as a culture, that we can steal the sovereignty, purposes, and freedom of billions of fully sentient beings whose suffering is, to them, as significant as ours is to us, and miraculously escape the consequences of this violent behavior? As we enslave others, we become enslaved ourselves. The net is ever tightening, and the mass media lulls us into complacency, while the ruling elite stages ridiculous, obviously bogus “terrorist attacks” in order to scare us, and make us like infants scream and run to our parents for security and protection.
The system infantilizes us by forcing us, like perennial infants, to drink milk our entire lives, to be taken care of by authoritarian medical and governmental forces, to seek happiness in consuming meaningless and distracting products and entertainment. Like infants, we are fed foods of violence without comprehension, and it never occurs to us to take responsibility for our violence toward others, to question the official stories that are drilled into us and that enslave and numb us and steal our freedom and sensitivity.
Every human being–like every living being–is a manifestation of the light of eternal consciousness. Each of us has a purpose and we all deserve respect. We experience self-respect and are respected to the degree that we respect others. We celebrate lives of freedom to the degree that we allow others to celebrate their lives freely. Our routine daily violence toward millions of animals for food is enslaving us and destroying our freedom.
The only lasting solution to the TSA abuses is veganism: as long as we reduce others to objects and steal their sovereignty, we will be reduced and lose our sovereignty. I urge all of us to support the efforts of Ron Paul, EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), and others working to rein in Homeland Security and the TSA. More important, though, are our efforts to deepen our understanding and practice of vegan living, of ahimsa (non-violence), which is the essence of veganism, and to advocate vegan living as earnestly and skillfully as we can. There is nothing we can do that’s more essential for freedom, peace, sustainability, and for our health and happiness. We are all interconnected. What we do to others, we do to ourselves. We see it everywhere when we awaken from the mass hypnosis of the military-industrial-meat-medical-media complex of materialism and fear. The most effective way to resist the oppression of the established order, and work to transform it, is to embody and spread the vegan message. Without this our efforts are merely ironic–we want for ourselves what we refuse to give to others. Our culture will be a vegan culture of celebrating respect for all life, or an alternative that is painful to contemplate.
To find out about these ideas, please read The World Peace Diet, and consider becoming a WPD facilitator to help spread them. We are offering the first-ever WPD facilitator training modules in December and January. Together we can be the change we yearn to see; as we act, the positive evolution becomes inevitable. It is our future calling to us.